Dear all, We have the same problem in English with the abstract concept of set. Wetalk of a herd of cows, a flock of chickens, a pod of whales , a pride oflions. Each animal grouping has it's own word. The French have "assemblage(forgive my spelling, I can't find my French dictionary.) for a group ofobjects. In his autobiography, Stan Ulam mentions that French is the bestlanguage for mathematics. It's almost Goldylocks: mathematical statements inEnglish are understatements, statements in German are overstatements, butstatements in French are just right. Ulam mentions that he had this thoughtwhile delivering a lecture and was amazed that his head could carry on twoconversations at once. Peace from a hot, hot Albany Georgia,DON

> From: Martin Davis <martin@eipye.com>> Reply-To: historia-matematica@chasque.apc.org> Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 16:48:52 -0700> To: historia-matematica@chasque.apc.org> Subject: Re: [HM] Counting from Zero> > At 07:35 AM 8/2/2005, Ralph A. Raimi wrote:> >> I have been told that while mathematicians might have words for>> the members of N, daily speech in Japan does not, but uses words with>> affixes, such as "three flat things", a word or syllable that has a>> different sound from "three round things". I have seen a linguist in a>> demonstration trying to get the word "three" from a Japanese girl, as if>> he had landed in Japan from Mars. He held up three fingers>> interrogatively and recorded her sound, then held up three sheets of>> paper, three marbles and so on. He was unable to find a root in the>> various responses, as he would with some European language. Is this>> correct? And does it hold in some way for the ordinals? If we are to>> decide what is natural, what "comes first", it would be well to begin with>> living languages.> > There are two sets of number words in Japanese, one set (ichi, ni, san ,> ...) derived from the Chinese reading of the characters. I don't remember> how the second set goes. The number words for different kinds of things are> made from the second set of number words by adding appropriate suffixes.> > Martin